Proposed Blue Water Hotel
Dear Editor:
Over-development can be detrimental to an area and no amount of tax revenue to a city or increased profit margin for the landowner can justify the negative impact it has on an area.
The 3-dimensional concrete high-rise hotel/garage [proposed Blue Water hotel in The Cove] will tower over the Hillsboro Bridge by over 20 feet, higher yet with its A/C units, etc. on the roof, and change the skyline forever. Not a pretty view for the gateway to our award-winning beach, a sight that will be bare of landscaping at that height.
It will set a precedent for other landowners in The Cove to follow suit and ask for code deviations and special consideration for the plans they may have. Parking is already a community nightmare.
There were many public workshops regarding the “look” the residents wanted for the Cove Shopping Center and overwhelmingly the consensus did not include high rise construction.
Other concerns are traffic pattern changes with only one egress and ingress on Hillsboro Blvd. that is already bottle-necked on weekends, holidays, and every 30 minutes when the bridge opens. One egress and ingress onto 15 Avenue, a residential street, will result in cut-through traffic in The Cove Residential Home Development. Fourth Ct., 7 Court, 10 Street, 12 Avenue, 13 Court (any street with access to Federal) will become avenues for people headed south or west. Some streets have no sidewalks and speed humps already installed to slow traffic. Tenth Street that leads to Federal Hwy, I-95, and the Sawgrass Expressway is a residential street (two lanes) and residents are now asking the city for more speed humps.
The city has already tried to slow traffic and discourage cut-through traffic with roundabouts and islands (narrowing the roads more). How effective? Perhaps a little now, but with added traffic, [results are] very questionable.
The 15 Avenue bridge also narrows and has no sidewalks. It is not what this one hotel will bring; it is what will be brought by future development as codes are changed and variances awarded.
Impact will escalate safety problems for the families in this development. At any given time you see parents and grandparents walking their children by hand or in strollers, their dogs on leashes, walking and jogging on the narrow streets with too few sidewalks and curbs.
As codes change and some proposed uses are permitted uses or conditional uses, the city will face many dilemmas and perhaps legal challenges by all landowners in this area desiring to increase their profit margins by use of high rise development and other deviations from the building codes.
I ask our Commission to please be very cautious with permitted/ conditional use changes and in approving variances in this small shopping center.
I live in the Cove Residential Home Development and want it to remain as quiet, safe, and traffic free as possible. Our quality of life and that of future generations depends on decisions made now.
Marti McGeary
Deerfield Beach, FL
The Cove meters
Dear Editor:
It’s Sunday afternoon and we’re heading to The Cove shopping center for happy hour and it made me start thinking about the parking meters again. Will I go somewhere else because of them? Probably not, but it just boils my blood.
If this is just a maintenance issue that only costs about $80,000 a year, so I’m told, what are they going to do with other $1.2 million of the projected income of $1.3 million? Is it going to be like the utility tax and supposed to lower our taxes? Because we all know how well that worked for us. It sounds like just another revenue [stream] for [the] city to me.
Steven J. Fabrizio
Deerfield Beach, FL
